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I strongly suspect that a forcing function that causes people to have challenges that proves their self worth, society is likely to collapse in the style of the
by supriyo-biswas 3y ago
I strongly suspect that a forcing function that causes people to have challenges that proves their self worth, society is likely to collapse in the style of the "behavioral sink" experiment[1] (though I agree the way it'd play out in humans would be a bit different).
Traditionally, these challenges have come through challenges associated with a hunter-gatherer or an agricultural lifestyle, and in contemporary times, it is associated with a job.
There are other forms which can make feel people rewarded, such as through the excess consumption of food or social media activity, but since they do not have an associated mental or physical challenge, they only have negative worth and cannot be the basis for someone's self worth and value.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
- squigz 3y ago> Traditionally, these challenges have come through challenges associated with a hunter-gatherer or an agricultural lifestyle, and in contemporary times, it is associated with a job. Maybe it's time we found other "forcing functions"?
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoI'm not aware of mechanisms that could replace these; could you propose some that would work in a world where most or all jobs have been replaced with AI or other automated systems?
- squigz 3y agoPractically everything that people do that isn't a "job" - sports, cooking, crafts, philosophy, etc. In short, "creating stuff" Furthermore, it seems silly to me to think that all human intellectual endeavors will simply disappear. We will still need to drive science, build bigger and better AI systems, improve and repair the world, etc.